Intellectual Property Rights Holders Association Blog

According to The Wall Street Journal, the file-sharing web sites Pirate Bay and Kazaa made attempts to launch as legal music download sites after the copyright infringement charges both are facing. Hans Pandeya, the CEO of the Swedish company Global Gaming Factory (GGF) explained that his company would acquire the Pirate Bay for nearly $8 million. However, the site would now be subscribed to by users and would be a “give and take” model.

This model would work by having content providers and copyright owners being paid for user uploads, and subscribers might work off subscription fees by sharing content, or by lending PC storage capacities.

Nevertheless, this week, Ricardo Dijkstra, attorney for the GGF announced that GGF would only purchase the Pirate Bay if it could be turned into a legitimate business. He said the business would depend on “whether those assets can be used in a legal manner.” GGF was named along with the Pirate Bay in a civil lawsuit and wants to currently emphasize that they presently do not have control over the BitTorrent site.

Kazaa has now managed to break free of any legal woes. Although they were brought down along with Napster in 2006, they now have become a legitimate business and users can now download unlimited music for $19.98 per month.

According to Wired, a federal jury found Jammie Thomas-Rasset liable in June in the nation’s only RIAA file-sharing case to go to trial. Thomas-Rasset is said have infringed upon 24 songs and has charged her almost nearly $2 million. Unfortunately for Thomas-Rasset, this trial occurs just two years after the judge claimed a mistrial; in this trial she was ordered to pay around $220,000. Nevertheless, Thomas-Rasset chose to have a new trial instead of settling like the thousands of other users the RIAA has sued or threatened to sue for copyright infringement. Problems were encountered when she testified; claiming that her children may have utilized her computer for the purpose of file-sharing on Kazaa. In her previous trial, she claimed a file-sharing hack hijacked her WiFi connection; although she did not own a WiFi router.

According to Commerce Times, Tim Reynolds, an attorney for the RIAA, explained to jurors that the record companies would prove that Thomas-Rasset, illegally shared songs on the Kazaa network. He claimed that because of women like Thomas-Rasset, this illegal downloading has cost the music industry not only billions of dollars but has also been responsible for thousands of lost jobs. Once again, Thomas-Rasset claims that she did not share files illegally. Her defense attorney, Kiwi Camara, counters that the record companies cannot prove that she shared files illegally. In fact, he called her “one of the industry’s best customers, with a collect of over 200 CDs.”